Dungeon Crawling For Mice
I should preface this by saying that I strongly dislike rodents, mice and squirrels in particular. Not in the sense of a phobia, but in the way you would actively dislike someone who’s trying to steal your stuff and wreck your house.
Mice are not cute, they’re not cuddly, and they’re not our friends. They’re the enemies of human civilization and they have been so for millennia, ever since we discovered agriculture. Mice break into our homes, steal our food, and leave their disease-ridden droppings in their wake. I can just imagine some Neolithic farmer, toiling through the growing season to produce a surplus to feed his family, only for his entire family to die of various illnesses because of rodent droppings in his food storage.
In fact, I was kind of annoyed when I was reading an article about upcoming indie games and I saw that so many of them have anthropomorphic mice as protagonists.
So I don’t like mice.
I admit my dislike of mice has sharpened ever since I became a homeowner. I have an old house – it may have been built in the 1920s, but it was probably built earlier, since the region of the US in which I live did not start keeping records on houses until the 1920s. So it has an extensive crawlspace, and several areas where mice can enter. I’ve gone to vexatious and expensive lengths to seal every possible entry point, but the mice keep finding new ones.
Despite that, thanks to a lot of work and some help from various family members with experience in pest control, the problem is a manageable one. I’ve narrowed down the remaining places where mice can enter the building, and an array of various traps wait to greet them properly. In the old days, I never really liked August because I worked in higher ed and it was when the school year would start. Nowadays, it’s when the mice around here really start looking to build nests in earnest.
Now for what seems like a completely unrelated topic – this summer I started playing WIZARDRY: PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD. The game is a classic “dungeon crawl” game. Indeed, it is one of the earliest progenitors of the genre. If you’re not familiar with that kind of game, in a dungeon crawl, the adventurers descend deeper and deeper into a vast subterranean labyrinth, fighting increasingly powerful monsters and accumulating treasure and experience. Probably the earliest version of the game was ROGUE in the early 1980s. There have been clever variations on the formula – in the DUNGEON KEEPER and WAR FOR THE OVERWORLD games, you’re the dungeon lord defending your subterranean realm from invading adventurers.
As you might guess, I like dungeon crawls quite a bit, and frequently include them in my fantasy books. FROSTBORN: THE BROKEN MAGE is basically one big dungeon crawl.
Anyway, one day earlier this week I had to reset a mouse trap, and then I sat down to play WIZARDRY: PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD, and I had a realization both disturbing and amusing.
My house is a dungeon crawl for mice.
It totally fits the conventions of the genre. A vast, incomprehensible maze of a structure, built by terrifying creatures called “humans”. Should you delve deep enough into this unnatural labyrinth, you can find treasures beyond imagination – enough food to steal to feed generations of mice, and places to build warm and secure nests.
Yet there is danger around every corner, for the humans that live in the house do not like intruders, and have placed a deadly array of traps to kill unwary mice. Beware the smell of peanut butter, for it might be resting in the jaws of a lethal trap. Avoid doors of metal, for they close behind you and never open again. Be wary of floors that seem too smooth, for they are coated with a remorseless adhesive that does not release even in death.
Apparently in the early days of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and other tabletop RPGs, some game designers enjoyed designing dungeons that were as lethal as possible to player characters.
If I am to be vexed with recurrent mouse incursions, then hopefully my house becomes the sort of place where mouse adventurers never, ever return from. 
-JM
